This is a notebook of projects I attempt with a Raspberry Pi or wearable technology

About me

In the photo I am in the blue blouse. It's taken on the famous little railway to Shimla. I'm a Code Club volunteer and love messing about with computing and particularly coding in Scratch. I want to get into 'maker' stuff using my Raspberry Pi but I'm a complete newbie. I am learning a bit about electronic making by going to Leeds Raspberry Jam once a month. I'm looking to do a robot project with the Raspberry Pi Zero in the future. I've just started an adventure to code wearable LEDs using an Adafruit Gemma. And I've been lucky to have been given a CodeBug so I'm learning to use that too!

What I wish I’d known about Raspberry Pi

My Raspberry Pi is a model B.

The one thing I didn’t know was how to shutdown properly. When you shutdown from the Graphical User Interface (GUI)* you need to wait a while before switching off the power or your Operating System can get corrupted. This is especially true when you use it for the first time as it writes a lot to the SD card initially. If you are in the LX Terminal^ screen and something’s not gone right or you need to shutdown from it, type: sudo shutdown -h now If it asks for a password, put in raspberry (and it won’t show up on the screen when you type it in). I don’t have a clue what the -h is about so if you know please tell me.

When finishing, I’ve noticed that the green LED next to the red LED on my Raspberry Pi Model B stays lit for a bit after I’ve chosen Shutdown and the cursor flashes in the top left hand corner of the monitor screen. After that the green LED flashes on and off a few times. After this the monitor screen says ‘No signal’, the green light stays off and it’s fine to switch off.

To go from LX Terminal to the Graphical User Interface type startx . You can go the other way to LX Terminal by choosing the LX Terminal icon which looks like a monitor. I don’t use LX Terminal because I don’t know what I’m doing in there, except I have changed the output of the sound on my Pi to use the 3.5 mm jack socket as this fitting is what I’ve got on the wire to my speakers. I did this by typing: sudo amixer cset numid=3 1 To send it back to the HDMI output (i. e. use the monitors speaker) type: sudo amixer cset numid=3 2

That’s the end of today’s blurb. Happy Raspberry Pi-ing!

* The GUI is the screen with the icons, such as the one with Scratch cat on it.

^ The LX Terminal screen is the one with white writing on a black background.